In the following interview Dr. Oleksander Krasilshchikov talks on array of topics. Olke describes his long career in sports, his first assignment in India, the talent selection process, key abilities that athletes need to develop to compete at the highest level, sports physiology, talent identification programs and much more.

In the following interview Dr. Oleksander Krasilshchikov talks on array of topics. Olke describes his long career in sports, his first assignment in India, the talent selection process, key abilities that athletes need to develop to compete at the highest level, sports physiology, talent identification programs and much more.

This startup is moulding grassroots cricketers into stars through a data-driven approach

The cricket-crazy nation of India might is also the leading country in Asia when it comes to sports technology. The country is an abode to more than 3X amount of sports-based startups than any other Asian countries. While a majority of this sector is dominated by fantasy sports platforms, and booking and matchmaking platform, the app CricHeroes has brought a unique revolution that has managed to disrupt the sports ecosystem in the country.

In India cricket is followed passionately across the majority of households and all the discussions and debate about the game have to be substantiated with data. Whenever we talk about an international cricket match, with discussing the numbers associated with them including the batting figures, bowling figures, strike rate, economy, among others. However, this analysis has been long restricted to professional cricket and has not been tracked in the grassroots. In order to bridge this gap, three Ahmedabad sports enthusiasts — Abhishek Desai, Meet Shah, and Kuntal Shah started CricHeroes back in October 2016.

The Cric Heroes App

The app helps young players improve themselves by recording every game they play. It also recognizes stakeholders like umpires, scorers, and commentators, who usually do not get their due credit. CricHeroes lists stakeholders in each area so that users can select them for tournaments/services.

In an exclusive interview with The Bridge, Co-Founder Meet Shah explained, “CricHeroes is a platform for grassroots cricketers and grassroots cricket organizers to score their matches/tournaments digitally. It is absolutely free. Players get recognized for their achievements which are tracked on this app. It helps you score and record all your data and analyze your performance. If you are a player you can see all your stats and achievements being tracked by this app, everything that international players get. We disseminate all information about the cricket ecosystem including cricket grounds, academies, scorers, umpires, among others.”

In just about three-and-a-half-years of their journey, CricHeroes has grown to be the world’s number 1 cricket scoring app. Starting in Ahmedabad, it slowly made its presence felt in all over Gujarat. Now the app has a presence over 4,000 cities across 50+ countries in the world.

The value proposition of the app lies in its mobile-first approach to organizing the vast sector of grassroots cricket in India and other cricket playing countries. As per the ICC, there are more than 300 million participants at all levels above the age of 16 and 1 billion+ fans of Cricket.

CricHeroes provides a platform for these cricketers to showcase their talent and get recognition for their achievements and become a better cricketer.

“The uniqueness of the app lies its easy-to-use interface. You have all the necessary attributes loaded within the app and within 5 minutes you can start a game. The app has also opened opportunities for networking with players, associations, umpires, scorers and other ecosystem holders. Every player has their own profile. Once the match is over, the app automatically reflects which player is the man of the match and who has the best bowling figures or batting figures. It has dedicated algorithms for every aspect. It is entirely data-driven. For Business around Cricket, we have launched Market, which allows them to push their services in their targeted regions and get more business from the platform” says Meet.

The startup has grown leaps and bound over the years with a team of 30 members. Already, over 6.4L+ club matches and over 40 thousand tournaments have been successfully on the app.

The coronavirus pandemic has affected almost all walks of life and sports have come to a standstill. WIth lockdown being effective across the country, none of the tournaments or even the regular gully cricket matches have been stopped. However, for CricHeroes, it’s business as usual as they have taken a pragmatic approach to use this dull phase to clean the platform and making inroads on partnerships.

“Not having anyone to play cricket is a big setback. However, the lockdown has abled us to do a lot of cleanups in the app. We have utilized the time to clean the platform and we have started focusing more on partnerships around the cricket ecosystem. This gap has allowed us to do it more quickly. We are also doing surveys for Scorers, Umpires, Grounds, Tournament Organizers and trying to understand what we can do more to become a better platform. We are also developing new features inside the app and creating video content to educate the users on how to use the app,” points out Meet.

To engage with the users, CricHeroes has been conducting online quizzes, polls, trivia, local and international news on their app as well. They now run two quizzes and polls every week. Besides, they are officially working with ICC and BCCI affiliated associations to make their headway in the big picture.

“We are helping 15+ BCCI affiliated Associations and 20+ ICC affiliated Associations to score all their official tournaments on CricHeroes. We help them to analyze a player’s performances, providing top performers lists (Category & Tournament wise) and help them during their selection process. We also have a feature where they do live-stream their matches” concludes Meet.

CricHeroes aims to reach 8-10m users mark by the end of the year. They set big goals to become the defacto platform not only for grassroots cricketers but also for professionals and businesses around cricket.

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